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April 2, 2014

[The 100-page report, “Under China’s Shadow: Mistreatment of Tibetans in Nepal,” documents the repression faced by Tibetans who cross into Nepal, often illegally, from neighboring Tibet, which has been ruled since 1951 by the Chinese Communist Party. The report also discusses how some of those refugees might never enter Nepal proper, saying there are “serious concerns that Nepal may at times forcibly return Tibetans to China.”]

The
100-page report, “Under China’s Shadow: Mistreatment of Tibetans in Nepal,”
documents the repression faced by Tibetans who cross into Nepal, often
illegally, from neighboring Tibet, which has been ruled since 1951 by the
Chinese Communist Party. The report also discusses how some of those refugees
might never enter Nepal proper, saying there are “serious concerns that Nepal
may at times forcibly return Tibetans to China.”

Any
forced return of Tibetans at the border would be a violation of a “gentleman’s
agreement” between Nepal and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees, which runs a transit center for Tibetans in the Katmandu Valley.
That agreement is aimed at guaranteeing Tibetans safe passage to India, which
has a significant Tibetan refugee population.

Many
Tibetans have complained of repression — including torture and suppression of
religious practices — under Chinese rule. Those who are caught having tried to
enter Nepal or returning to Tibet after a trip to India are often held for
weeks or months in detention and interrogated.

Many
Tibetans cross through Nepal to India to try to see the Dalai Lama, the
spiritual leader of the Tibetans, who lives in the foothills of the Indian
Himalayas, or to try to build a better life away from the confines of Tibet and
China. There are about 20,000 Tibetans in Nepal.

The
flooding of parts of the Tibetan plateau with Chinese security forces since the
Tibetan uprising of 2008 and greater cooperation between Chinese and Nepalese
forces have resulted in a huge drop in the number of Tibetan refugees arriving
in Nepal. In 2013, fewer than 200 refugees were recorded as having fled China
to Nepal, compared with an annual average of 2,000 before 2008, Human Rights
Watch said.

Nepal
was traditionally a haven for Tibetan refugees, but that is no longer the case,
given China’s economic influence in the region. Nepal, a poor, landlocked
nation, relies on investment from China to help its economy. The government
also tries to strengthen ties with China as a counterbalance to India.

In the remote
Buddhist kingdom of Mustang, which borders Tibet, China provides $50,000 in annual
food aid. Chinese military officials meet there with local Nepalese to talk
about what the ceremonial prince of Mustang called “border security” in an
interview with The New York Times in 2012. In the 1960s, Mustang was the base
for Tibetan guerrillas trained by the C.I.A. to wage war on Chinese troops
occupying their homeland.

“The
situation for the Tibetan refugee community in Nepal has markedly deteriorated
since China’s violent crackdown on protests in Tibet in 2008,” Brad Adams, the
Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a written
statement.

Shankar
Prasad Koirala, a spokesman for the Ministry of Home Affairs, said in an
interview on Tuesday that Nepal had never mistreated any refugees on Nepalese
soil. “Though we have yet to sign international treaties concerning refugees,
we are behaving well to all refugees on humanitarian grounds,” he said.

Mr.
Koirala said the government would investigate any security officials suspected
of mistreating refugees.

In
recent years, Tibetans in Katmandu, the Nepalese capital, have complained of
detentions by security forces during anti-China protests. Those forces break up
rallies and sometimes prevent public gatherings on dates that the Chinese
government considers sensitive, such as the Dalai Lama’s birthday. Even celebrations
of Tibetan culture can be shut down, refugees say.

Tenzin
Chokzin, 22, a Tibetan refugee in Katmandu, said in an interview last month
that Tibetans in Nepal were often barred from performing in cultural programs.
“Police vigilance has tightened after 2008,” he said. “We are even forced to
cancel our cultural programs organized in hotels.”

Mr.
Koirala said the Nepalese government could not tolerate any protests that might
harm the interests of neighboring countries.

Since
2009, more than 120 Tibetans in Chinese-ruled Tibet have set themselves on fire
to protest Communist Party policies. In February 2013, a Tibetan monk in
Katmandu, Drupchen Tsering, 25, died after setting himself on fire near a
revered Buddhist stupa, or shrine, in Boudhanath, a Tibetan enclave. Tibetans
in the area asked for the body, but officials ordered it cremated in the middle
of the night, saying no family members had claimed it.

The
Human Rights Watch report said China decided to “significantly scale up its
economic and political engagement with Nepal” after the 2008 uprising. The
culmination of those efforts was a January 2012 visit to Nepal by Wen Jiabao,
then the Chinese prime minister.

China
has become a top foreign direct investor in Nepal, a move that is, according to
the report, “in part aimed at influencing Nepal’s calculations about where its
national interests lie.”

[He has reached out to the Muslims. He has told them that their true foe is not the Hindu but poverty. But he has also refused to apologize for the riots in Gujarat, even as a chief minister who was not competent enough to protect the Muslims in his care. Nor has the community been comforted by his remarks on other subjects. Months after the riots, in a speech, Mr. Modi took a dig at the fact that Muslim men in India can have four wives by law. Playing on the family-planning campaign slogan “We two, ours two,” he said that the Muslim version was “We five, ours 25.”]

By Manu Joseph

NEW DELHI — One
hundred and eighty million is a lot of people, even in India. It is the
approximate size of India’s Muslim population, arrived at through arithmetic
rather than by survey. There has been no official statistic since a 2001
survey, because the growth of the community is now deemed a sensitive matter.

There is only one
political party in India that is guaranteed the contempt of such a large
portion of humanity, yet it is that very party that is expected to win the
highest number of seats in the general election in April and May. It can win
many more if Muslims so choose.

The Bharatiya Janata
Party, which heads the opposition in Parliament, was born out of a movement to
assert that India is essentially a Hindu nation, and to challenge the phony but
profitable secularism of the Indian National Congress party. As such, it was
genetically predisposed to antagonize Muslims, the second-largest religious
community in India. The party knows that it cannot win the hearts of Muslims,
but as the general election approaches, it is conveying the message that they
should vote for it for very practical reasons: prosperity and peace. But the
party’s own personality traits make this a difficult sell.

In 2001, when the
party appointed a backroom strategist named Narendra Modi as chief minister of
the western state of Gujarat, he had yet to contest even a village election.
Soon after he took over, violent riots erupted in Gujarat in which more than a
thousand died, a fact that is always followed by the crucial detail “mostly Muslims.”
Mr. Modi has been accused of facilitating the massacre. Over the years, chiefly
because of his ambiguous role in the riots, he grew in stature among Hindus
across the nation, and he is now the party’s prime ministerial candidate.

He has reached out
to the Muslims. He has told them that their true foe is not the Hindu but
poverty. But he has also refused to apologize for the riots in Gujarat, even as
a chief minister who was not competent enough to protect the Muslims in his
care. Nor has the community been comforted by his remarks on other subjects.
Months after the riots, in a speech, Mr. Modi took a dig at the fact that
Muslim men in India can have four wives by law. Playing on the family-planning
campaign slogan “We two, ours two,” he said that the Muslim version was “We
five, ours 25.”

He has reformed his
public utterances of late. Still, just this week he said that the Congress
party was killing rhinoceroses in a northeastern border state to make room for
illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. He insisted that he was not joking. Such
immigrants are of particular interest to his party, which fears that they
inflate the already expanding population of Muslims in India.

The party is also
incoherent in its wooing of Muslims. The chief of its “strategic action
committee,” Subramanian Swamy, who was drafted into the party last year, wrote
in 2011 that Indian Muslims must accept that their ancestors were Hindus or be
denied voting rights.

On Mr. Swamy’s
committee is the journalist, author and former Congress member M.J. Akbar. Mr.
Akbar was never perceived as Muslim by his readers until he formally joined the
B.J.P. last month. He told me that he had joined the party because “Congress
has done nothing for Muslims. They believe hypocrisy is enough. Somebody has to
stand up for Muslims in a modern way.”

He said that he had
been impressed by Mr. Modi over a period of time. He was particularly touched
by the way Mr. Modi reacted in October after a few low-intensity bombs went off
near the venue of a campaign rally just hours before he arrived. The largely
Hindu gathering was incensed.

“Riots happen when
people are on their way home,” Mr. Akbar said. “When people are in large mobs
and going home, that’s when it happens. Soon after the bombs went off, what
Modi told the crowds was, ‘Go home in peace.’ He believed in what he said.”

Mr. Modi, indeed, is
a man who knows a lot about how riots spread. That is the reason the community
is wary of him.

Manu Joseph is
author of the novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People.”